


Dark Soul

by Miya_Morana



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:02:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miya_Morana/pseuds/Miya_Morana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock isn't scared of anything—except boredom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the second horror comment meme at sharp_teeth back in 2010.

Sherlock can see things, things that other people’s brains, as he’s come to understand, will not take notice of. He can see how everything is connected. It’s almost instinctive to him. His brain is like a machine that’s always running, jumping from idea to idea, from logical connection to logical connection.

He tries to explain this to his brother once, when they are still children. He thinks Mycroft is like him, he _is_ very smart too after all.

But Mycroft doesn’t get it. Not quite. He thinks it’s a gift.

It isn’t. If anything, it’s a curse. When Sherlock lays in his bed at night, watching the shadows cast across his ceiling twist and move, his brain keeps going, and he remembers everything he’s seen during the day, every single little detail that betrayed people’s secrets.

How the corners of the nurse’s lips came up when she was punishing Mycroft for breaking a vase. How Mummy’s latest lover fists his hands whenever she talks to him, the gleam in his eyes as he watches her jewels or the paintings on the living room walls. Everyone has some sort of dark secret, except they’re no secrets to Sherlock, they’re obvious, almost as if their souls were screaming at him. ‘Look at me, I’m rotten.’

Everyone is tainted. Everyone is capable of the worst. Sherlock knows. When he has nothing to do, nothing to occupy his brain, he starts thinking up scenarios in which the people he knows, the people he loves, would come to do the worst things. And he _knows_ they are all viable scenarios.

He knows that in the right circumstances, just about everyone he knows could be lead to willingly hurting him. And his brain always comes back to this, whenever it can, it jumps back to the multitude of ways his family and friends can hurt him, torture him, kill him. 

It terrifies him.

So Sherlock fills his brain with knowledge, and when that’s not enough anymore he starts investigating, looking for the most tangled mysteries, to keep the ever-running machine that is his brain occupied. He can’t afford to leave it alone, can’t afford to get bored.

Drugs dull his senses somehow, slow down his brain enough that it will stop jumping to morbid conclusion, stop imagining Mycroft hitting him over and over with a cane until every bone in his body is broken, stop imagining Mummy carving him up with a silver knife, stop imagining Lestrade watching him starve to death, locked up in a too-small cell.

But he gets caught, and has to leave the drugs alone, and all he has left is the murders and mysteries.

Then he meets John, the soldier, but his brain is busy enough with the suicide-murder case that Sherlock lets his guard down, lets himself feel for that strange man that doesn’t seem to see him as a freak. And when he catches up with the cabbie, when the mystery is mostly solved, his treacherous brain starts running again, showing him John emotionlessly shooting him, putting him down like a sick animal, executing him like an enemy soldier, all in a matter of seconds.

“You’d do anything to stop being bored.”

Yes. This is tempting. This is a game he can play. Which pill? Which pill is the good one? Keep his brain busy, focused. And if he picks wrong, at least he won’t be bored anymore. Won’t have to think up the hundred, the thousands ways John may come to kill him. So tempting.

The pills are identical. He picks one at random, tries to read the old man’s face. He’s not sure what he’s looking for. Not sure what he’s hoping for. Is he hoping he picked the right pill, outsmarted the man, won the game? Or is he hoping he took the other one? That it’s all over?

Does it even matter? Either way, at least right now he isn’t bored.


End file.
